With Smushed-Face Photos, Grotesque Hilarity Ensues

Joy Godfrey helps Ben Wood get all the tape out of his beard and hair after his portrait.

Amanda Stang mugs for the camera during her scotch tape shoot.

Amanda Stang laughs and screams at the same time as Wes Naman removes tape from her hair after the shoot.

Last Christmas, photographer Wes Naman and his assistant Joy Godfrey were wrapping presents in Naman’s photo studio when Godfrey randomly put a piece of scotch tape on her nose and pulled it into an awkward position. Naman followed suit by applying the tape to his lips.

Seeing the silliness contained in a simple household item turned a light on in Naman’s head. Fast-forward one year and the idea has blossomed into a project he calls Scotch Tape, in which he uses this pliable plastic to completely cover and distort people into zombie-like caricatures of themselves.

“I thought it would just be a fun side project but as it started to progress people really started to get into character and go over the top,” says Naman, who is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Last week Wired got the chance to watch several models as they went through the transformation into something out of Men in Black. It only takes about 10 minutes to apply the tape and Naman says that over time he’s found some reliable techniques to wrangle the absurd out of people.

There’s still a lot of bending of noses and lips, but Naman also likes to accentuate people’s eyes by stretching their eyebrows. People with jowly cheeks or beards get their skin and hair squeezed between strips of tape.

In front of the camera models are encouraged to work it by smiling and posing, but often times the best shots come when Naman has them try to tear the tape off using only their face muscles. Most of what you see in the final pictures is straight out of the camera, but sometimes certain features are accentuated slightly with the liquify tool in Photoshop.

Commercial photographer by day, Naman says these side projects are a way to keep photography fun. Instead of just running around shooting other people’s work and ideas, pieces like Scotch Tape let him air it out.

Naman’s got a list of over 250 creative ideas that sit on his iPhone and the list grows any time he comes across a piece of inspiration – a spot of lighting in a movie or a song lyric he hears while driving his car. One of his still-unrealized ideas came from a candid Facebook photo of a girl accidentally running into a glass door with a milkshake in her hand. Last year during Valentine’s Day he got to follow through with a percolating idea when he covered models from head to toe with white paint and then accentuated pieces of their face or costumes with red.

“What I’m ultimately aiming for with my work is to create a catalyst to help people see the world a little differently,” he says.

One of the perks of being creative for creativity’s sake is that sometimes the projects take on a life of their own. Before Naman had even finished the Scotch Tape series he was already in talks with a local Albuquerque add agency that saw the photos and wanted to possibly pitch them for a corporate campaign. Some of the ideas tossed around include selling the series to an office supply store or maybe a plastic surgery office with a slogan that might go something like, “You can trust those guys or you can come here.”

“Deep down it’s always nice when people have a strong reaction to my images,” Naman says. “I’ve had fun with this series but I’ve gotten it out of my system and I’m ready to move onto the next one. And there is no telling what that will be.”